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Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22 July, 2024
- i_k_k 2y agoA good argument for restricting voting to actual attendees.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- drakythe 2y agoMight be worth dropping some coin on getting the SFWA Lawyers to contract an outside data analysis group to verify these findings after the absolute fustercluck that was the Hugos 2023. I think this statement is made in good faith, and I believe they believe they are correct in their analysis but the shadow of the 2023 Hugos is long and dark. There will be questions regardless of how many good faith statements the committee makes. I don't envy them having to deal with this.
- inasio 2y agoKeep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names. The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoHuge by sci-fi novel standards. You could gains tens of thousands of dollars.
- ghaff 2y agoSo basically nothing. (I realize that comes across as blase but it really isn't a lot of money in the scheme of things.)
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoDo you know what percentage of published books in the USA each year is that sell more than 1000 copies?
- lmm 2y agoIsn't that the wrong baseline? I'm pretty sure the proportion of, IDK, disc golfers who win more than $100 in prize money is tiny, but that doesn't mean that a disc golfing tournament offering $100 needs to institute a massive anti-fraud crackdown.
- ghaff 2y agoVery few. That doesn't change the fact that selling more than that is still basically beer money for the most part with very rare exceptions.
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoYes, especially since it cost them around $20k to submit the votes. Whoever did it, it almost certainly wasn't because they were trying to make money from increased sales.
- surfingdino 2y agoIs there so much money to be made from winning a Hugo award or are bot farms so cheap?
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoAlmost certainly not. Probably someone with an axe to grind, not someone trying to make money.
- tialaramex 2y agoI would guess that to SF and Fantasy fans "Hugo Award winner" does serve as some indication of merit, beyond what is really entailed (some number of hard core SF/ fantasy fans liked at least one of their works). Outside, for example buying for a friend or colleague, I imagine it sounds like a generic literary award and they'd expect it was judged excellent by some number of experts, as with say a Booker. It's also a nice ego boost of course. If you like that kind of thing anyway. If you're Greg Egan or something it's probably dreadful.
- ghaff 2y agoThe problem is that "literary" awards, e.g. Nebulas in SF, probably tend to award more of a critic's sensibility than a fan's. But I'm not sure that Hugos are worth a whole lot at this point even as a fan's take.
- tialaramex 2y agoHard to say. Several of my personal favourite novels won a Hugo, including both Diamond Age and Rainbows End IIRC
- ghaff 2y agoThat's quite a long time ago before there was so much politicization. I do think there's still value but probably also increasing reasons for skepticism.
- BryantD 2y agoCost analysis: The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates. Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense. [1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/ https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/, WSFS Membership.
- Arainach 2y agoHow many future sales, speaking gigs, etc. does being a "Hugo-winning author" open up?
- zmj 2y agoI read a lot of SFF, but the actual Hugo / Nebula winners don't really move up in my reading list compared to the other nominees. Maybe the "winner" sticker drives some paper book sales?
- BryantD 2y agoSome? Not a ton. https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ has some data for one year. "They do have an effect, but probably no more than a few thousand sales for most books, maybe over ten thousand for the luckiest, and then only in exceptional years."
- ilamont 2y agoComing on the heels of the 2023 Hugo Awards disaster (certain authors excluded for fear of offending China, see https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...) it's hard to believe the supposed post-Chengdu reforms didn't take into account loopholes like this.
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoThere haven't been any reforms yet, only a transparency pledge by the committee administering this year's vote. It's not even possible for reforms to take place until the 2025 Worldcon because two consecutive business meetings need to ratify any changes.
- yzydserd 2y agoWhat’s the loophole? It’s a fan voted prize, and you get a vote for being a member, and you can become a member with a fee. If some person, people, or organisations attempted to masquerade as multiple non “natural” persons they seem to have been found out, which I would not call a “loophole”. By the way, as a member it seems you get a copy of all the books and stories, which makes the fee pretty decent.
- lmm 2y ago> If some person, people, or organisations attempted to masquerade as multiple non “natural” persons they seem to have been found out, which I would not call a “loophole”. Some entity or entities doing this in a very dumb way has been found out. Why should that give us any confidence that no other entities did this in more sophisticated ways?
- rodgerd 2y ago> certain authors excluded for fear of offending China, That is an extremely misleading summary of what was uncovered.
- michaelt 2y ago
- hdlothia 2y agoI imagine that working for organizations like this is a thankless job.
- semanticist 2y agoVolunteering, not working. Few, if any, people involved in running a WorldCon are getting paid for it.
- hdlothia 2y agoWow. There are probably so many things that we enjoy in this life that are managed by people volunteering and soldiering on in positions like this. I will make it a point to be more appreciative in the future
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago> We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. X doubt. Name names.
- perihelions 2y agoThis messy situation demands a lot of trust of the organisers—trust they do not have, after they corruptly tampered with the 2023 votes and tried to cover that up.
- teraflop 2y agoWho's "they"? Each year's Worldcon is run by an entirely different set of people.
- rodgerd 2y agoWhile the organisers have changed, up until this year the same person has written the un-audited software and run the voting process previously - which was how he was able to discard huge numbers of votes covertly last year, for example.
- mcphage 2y ago> which was how he was able to discard huge numbers of votes covertly last year I don't think it was very covert–the conference organizers are required to release their data, which they did, and the voting issues were immediately apparent.
- rodgerd 2y agoWell, it was initially covert, and he stalled both the results and then the votes, both under pressure around the "clean up" he was doing.
- jdougan 2y agoIncorrect, there has historically been a "Permanent Floating WorldCon Committee" [1] that has provided a lot of continuity. Sometime they have fill higher ranking slots when the locals don't have enough experience. [1] https://fancyclopedia.org/Permanent_Floating_Worldcon_Committee https://fancyclopedia.org/Permanent_Floating_Worldcon_Commit...
- deleted 2y ago
- ThinkBeat 2y agoThis was discovered due to the bad actor being incompetent. Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected. Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.
- perihelions 2y ago- "Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial." The FCC fake-comment fraud involved literally millions of real identities and real names [0]. It was caught for a different reason: many of the comments had identical text strings. [0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-secures-615000-companies-supplied-fake-comments-influence https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-...
- Something1234 2y agoHave any heads rolled over this yet?
- perihelions 2y agoThe corporations that funded this fraud got what they wanted (at that point in time, when the FCC sided with them in policy) and were not punished with even so much as a fine. It's a very interesting example, to me: the telecom companies set up an arms-length arrangement with the criming entities, the "social media consultants", such that if the fraud were caught (and it was), the people who benefited from the crime, and intended for the crime to happen, could plausibly plead ignorance. US law apparently has no good solution to this type of "wink-and-nod" white-collar crime.
- andrewflnr 2y ago> Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected. Not at all clear, actually. They wouldn't have been discovered by this exact heuristic, but that's not to say this was the most complex fraud the Hugo committee were capable of detecting.
- danielodievich 2y agoHugo and Nebula awards drive my fun-reading list. It is sad to hear that even this quaint corner of the book world is no longer ignored by vote and review manipulators. Is nothing holy anymore!? man shakes a fist at the space-ship shaped cloud
- astrodust 2y agoThey've been actively under attack for over a decade now. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies We can't have nice things.
- lambda 2y agoYeah, there were the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns, which led Worldcon to change the award rules. Then in 2023 there was the self-censorship incident for the Chengdu Worldcon (and also some question about the ballot for selection of Chengdu in the first place, I believe). Now this. The Hugos are really having a lot of trouble recently.
- lmm 2y agoThe Sad Puppies were a response to the sorry state of Hugo voting, not the start of it. The Hugo process was designed (and to use that word at all is overstating things) for a world where there were enough independent SF magazines to both avoid groupthink and hopefully cover most of what was worth reading between them.
- WorldMaker 2y agoHah. The WorldCon was designed to travel between cities and between continents to increase diversity of opinion. It doesn't need independent SF magazines to avoid "groupthink", it already has a world of diversity and the natural forcing function of the primary voters being attending members and attending members encouraging local memberships in addition to travellers. That was as much a part of the controversy of the Chengdu WorldCon as any of the mistakes they made. The WorldCon was built to welcome that sort of diversity of opinion from an entirely under-represented part of the world in voting to that point. Even if the Chengdu WorldCon hadn't made silly mistakes it still would have angered a lot of people by how much it proved the Hugos actually aren't about "groupthink" and try to get a diversity of opinions.
- yzydserd 2y agoL Ron Hubbard will have to wait another year.
- edu_guitar 2y agoGiven how the names were generated, it seems the bad actor might actually want to be caught. Maybe it was trying to get the committee to disqualify a title. Since it doesn't make sense financially, as a sibling comments points out, so personal grudge might be the motivation. But I guess we'll never know.
- microtherion 2y agoThat's an interesting theory. At least one of the nominees is known to be on hostile terms with a group with a past record of trying to interfere with the Hugos.
- lmm 2y ago> Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year’s Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means. It is of course completely impossible that while one person was arranging fake votes using obviously fake names, they or someone else might have arranged fake votes using more realistically fake names. Like, I agree that there's not a lot that the committee can do here, but the Hugo voting process in its current form does not warrant this level of confidence. We simply cannot be sure whether the people who "won" did so fairly or not.
- em-bee 2y agoi didn't have "Hugo Awards have another ballot controversy" on my 2024 events bingo-card
- LanceH 2y ago"Transparency". No mention of who "Finalist A" is. Not very transparent, really.
- tomohawk 2y agoThe only type of voting that is secure is in person, secret ballot, after presenting id.
- totetsu 2y agoI was thinking the phrase "natural persons" was something sci-fi related, but its just the counter point to the concept of "legal persons"
- Taniwha 2y agoMy theory is that this is the first year that the AIs have tried to stuff the ballot for their favourite author, they're just not very good at it yet (and that Finalist A is likely Martha Wells)
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoWhy Martha Wells?
- ecjhdnc2025 2y agoAhh, the consistent, mind-boggling, teen-gamergate-troll immaturity of the Hugo Awards.